Intermediate wg summaries

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Brian E Carpenter wrote:
1. ADs physically don't have time to read intermediate drafts oustide their
own Area. So while they may suspect that a WG is heading in a worrisome
direction, they aren't in a position to do much about it.

Folks,

I hope no one doubts the basic truth of Brian's observation. My own feeling, in fact, is that expecting all ADs to read even the final draft is an excessive burden. Either way, it leads to the basic question of how ADs can be informed of the salient issues in a wg effort, long before an IESG vote?

Currently, wgs produce 4 things: charter, email list archive, meeting notes/summary, and output documents (specifications or whatever). None of these permits intelligent assessment of working group progress, by someone who is not significantly involved in a wg's on-going effort, without making a massive effort to review the archive and notes record. At best, the meeting summary is good for incremental issues, not summarizing integrated design (or syntax, or operations, or...) decisions.

Given that working groups operate over many months or years, it seems like we need something that is a work-to-date design/decision summary.

If a working group's effort is solid and defensible, along the way, then it ought to be reasonable to request that it produce a summary of its work-to-date in a fashion that allows useful, critical review, without having to dive into the considerable detail of a specification or the wg record.

There is likely to be an added benefit for this, beyond giving ADs practical input for early- and middle-stage assessment: The rest of the community gets it, too. And by "the rest of the community", I mean the entire Internet community, not just IETF participants.

For work of any extended interest, being able to see a summary of on-going work that looks relevant to them has to be useful for deciding whether to participate but particularly useful for folks who cannot participate directly but are likely to be affected by the final output.


d/

--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

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